Wi-Fi sweetness at Bluetooth Evolution

There were so many buns at Bluetooth Evolution it might have been Sweet tooth Evolution, but the UWB vendors were sour that Wi-Fi was stealing their thunder.
I was surprised by a new fast Bluetooth option over Wi-Fi, but all...

There were so many buns at Bluetooth Evolution it might have been Sweet tooth Evolution, but the UWB vendors were sour that Wi-Fi was stealing their thunder.

I was surprised by a new fast Bluetooth option over Wi-Fi, but all Bluetooth SIG members and associates knew about it. so I left the conference expecting to find more on the Web. To my surprise I found nothing - whereas by this stage an IEEE standard would have generated pages of online discussion.

I had to piece together my story and a follow-up from my notes of what people said in the day. My apologies to readers for not being able to link to anything substantive on the subject, and to the people I quoted if they feel I didn't nuance them quite right.

On the second day of the conference, I did find a bit more. Apparently, the SIG commissioned a study group early in the year. It was open to any of the group's nearly 10,000 members, so widely known but little reported. It reported to the SIG in September, recommending the addition of Wi-Fi as an an Alternate MAC/PHY to the Bluetooth core specfications. This was approved by the SIG's Architecture Review Board, and I understand a working group has been set up to start producing the required specifications.

None of this is documented in anything on the public Bluetooth.com site, and the members' Bluetooth.org site isn't open to the public.

The only published evidence for any of this, as it turns out, is on the IEEE's web site (where else?). John Barr, chair of the Bluetooth SIG's board of directors, posted a Powerpoint presentation there, as part of the liaison between the two bodies. It explains the Wi-Fi Alternate MAC/PHY is on slides 13 onwards.

But, I wonder, is the Bluetooth SIG right to keep its work private? The IEEE never makes a standard without washing a lot of dirty linen in public, as vendors aren't ashamed to try to pack, split and delay committees. The Bluetooth SIG might argue it's more dignified - and maybe actually faster. Although this Wi-Fi MAC/PHY is about two years late by my reckoning.